Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

Sounds a bit similar to Atari in the late 70's early 80's. They didn't credit their developers, so several of them left and formed Activision, which credited their devs quite a bit (commercials, print ads, etc).

The International Game Developers Association has been working on this sort of problem and is trying to come up with guidelines for giving fair credit to game developers http://www.igda.org/credit/ [igda.org]. Perhaps this will give them a bit more attention.

The "credits at the beginning of movies" BS was foisted upon studios (and more importantly, the audiences) by the film actors' guild. It's stupid and annoying and caused a number of films to take twenty minutes of really boring opening sequence before getting around to actually starting.

If you go to a play, you don't get someone shouting all the mains' names during the opening act. You're lucky if everyone gets an individual bow during the curtain call. But you will get a program with bios of the important people and a list of everyone else. Which is just how it should be.

The credits should never have been part of the performance. With video games it's even easier. You don't have to worry about space, a PDF with thousands of names and a few bios won't take more than a few hundred kB. As long as the list is on the disk or in the manual, that should be sufficient. Anyone can look up the names if they want to, but no one is forced to watch page after page of "Key Grip's Page" scroll by if they don't want to.

Digital TV offers us additional options as well. Imagine stuffing an exhaustive list onto a data segment like closed captioning. Players could be made that record the list for perusal at any point during the show, and the list could be searchable. Heck, you could conceivably have a button that identifies all of the characters on the screen and their actors with a label just under their head. Such a list could be made far more complete than what you could send in a few minutes of scrolling with a font large enough to be read on a standard definition television.